Nearer to Thee
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: He is not who they think he is, a muddle of stories and lies, wrapped in an opera cloak and mask that are not his own but could be. But Charles de Chagny, all of 22 years old, craves to be closer to that past which is out of his reach. (Post Kay canon)
1. 1

When people address him as the Opera Ghost, he always replies with "No. That's my father."

Or at least, he often _imagines_ he does. He never actually does, never has measured how those words might feel rolling off his tongue. The Opera Ghost, _my father_. Even with a trace of sarcasm it sounds like something out of a penny dreadful, ludicrously dramatic.

At least when he signs his notes, few though they are, it is as _le Fantôme_. It's not that he extorts money or something like that, he just makes pointed suggestions for how things might be done better. Of course, some people don't like someone who may or may not be a ghost giving directions on how things should be run. They've tried to find him, have searched high and low for him, but it is terribly difficult to search for someone who is out of costume and in the search party.

Besides, he almost never lets himself be seen in costume. And on the occasions when he does because all ghosts need to permit themselves to be seen sometimes in order to perpetuate the fiction, he raises a haughty brow and whisks away if someone dares to address him by such a title.

Unfortunately, they don't see the raised brow. Not behind the mask.

It is not _actually_ his mask, one must understand it. He was not the maker of the mask and it was not his face that it was moulded to. Be that as it may, the mask fits perfectly. And though he knows the true owner of the mask never had a nose, his own nose fits the hollow of the fake nose perfectly, almost as if it were crafted for somebody who looks disturbingly like him.

He shakes the thoughts from his mind, but they have wormed themselves deep into his bones, and he cannot ignore them. The mask fits him because it _was_ made for someone who looks disturbingly like him, or at least was supposed to and had the same facial structure. If he were another man, he might lend it some supernatural significance. But he, Charles de Chagny, knows the truth, and the weight of it is almost enough to force him to his knees.

In truth, he always knew that there was something amiss. Even as a child he saw the lingering sadness in his mother's eyes, that sadness that intensified as she watched him play his music, and when she cried she said that it was because she was so proud of him, but he knew that if that were the case then she would be happy beneath the tears, wholly happy. And though there was happiness there it was tinged with that same melancholy.

(Some nights he would find her, sitting by the piano, her fingers resting on the keys and never playing, tears trickling down her cheeks. Those nights, he slipped back up to his room, and wondered why his father was not with her.)

His father – he still thinks of him as such, even now that he knows. He is his father, truly, in every way that matters, but some nights, sitting by the broken pipe organ in that house beside the lake, he wonders what _he_ might have been like, had he known.

Sometimes he sees him, sees them, as they might have been, her leaning her head on his shoulder by the fire, or him lying with his head in her lap, or the two of them standing, locked in an embrace. That tall shadow, his face something undefined, but those burning, eyes, that dark hair, those long fingers – fingers that he, Charles, could never have gotten from his supposed father, and yet he has them, and the hair, and stands too tall and too slim to be truly of that blood.

(They flicker at the edges of his vision, her face glowing with happiness, eyes shining looking up into that masked face, and he doesn't think he ever saw her so happy, not really. He pushes them away, wraps his arms tight around himself.)

It was only a few days after he came into his majority that his father sat him down, and told him. And it was a relief, nearly, to know for sure, to have a name that sits neater on his tongue. He gave him a stack of letters, written in a strange slanting hand, signed with a Persian name.

 _You mother kept up a correspondence with Monsieur Khan after-after everything that happened. I like to think he was a comfort to her when I could not be._

He has read those letters, over and over, sifted through each one for fragments of this man, his heart aching to be closer to him, to know. And when he told his father that he wished to return here, to the Garnier, his father simply nodded and murmured, _I imagined you might. Take all of the time you need._

It was easy to set himself up with regular concerts, easy to find a position for himself composing for their pleasure. And when, at last, he got the mechanism on the dressing room mirror to work he almost collapsed, then and there, but he collected himself and journeyed down.

(When he found the parlour in dusty disarray, the fragments of music manuscript on the floor, he did weep, tracing each note as if it might resurrect the man who wrote them, the woman who inspired them.)

He cleaned the house and put it in order, hoarded each little thing – scraps of paper, empty morphine bottle, dusty hypodermics – and the suits he found were perfectly tailored though they were a good two decades out of fashion, the shirts of the finest material, and the thought came to him that to be a ghost it helps to look at least a little old-fashioned. They fit him as if it were him that they had been made for, and he stood before the mirror, tall and elegant in black and wondered what his mother might think to see him now. Would it be a comfort to her that her son has come into what ought to always have been his? Or would it torment her that he has hidden himself away?

(Did it make it easier for her, at the end, to slip away when she knew it would reunite her with _him_ , Charles' father that is and isn't his father?)

It is temporary, he tells himself. Only temporary. He will leave, someday, and return to his father and continue on in a normal life, but there is that other father, that ghost in every shadow, and what he would not give to be able to sit him down and call him Papa and talk to him, just talk to him, as if he might understand this pain that aches deep inside his heart, pleading with him to do something, anything, to get back to that other time where he could know him, terrible though he may have been but he has no doubt that he loved his mother deeply and would he love him? Would he care for Charles at all? Would he be proud of what his son has become?

Erik. He weighs the name, learns the feel of it, the click, holds it close as if it were something sacred, his very blood racing for it. Erik. Why did his mother not name him Erik? Was it too painful for her, to have to face that name every day when it was someone other than _him_? Is that why he carries this name that sounds so English and rolls so softly in French?

(He knows the truth of that one, at least. The difficulty of his birth is something that he has known for a long time.)

He takes the mask off, runs his hand through his hair so that a lock of it drapes itself over his forehead. No. He could never be an Erik, not now that he knows. He is too different, can only ever be too different and even a phantom is a pretence, one that he thought might bring him comfort but weighs a burden instead. The sharp ache stabs inside of his chest and he swallows, straightens himself in the mirror. He is no Erik, wears his title as a mask, but he is Charles who composes sonatas and nocturnes and requiems and more and sits on a stage a famous man when his father, his true father, his blood father who made him tall and dark when he should have been small and blond and a Navy man, when his father never could, and perhaps that is the justice that he needs, perhaps that is the justice that _Erik_ – twenty-three years dead, a mystery almost unfathomable - deserves.

And when they ask him, someday, about his father, he will nod and say _I had two. One was a Vicomte, and one was a ghost_.


	2. 2

She told him stories, stories about angels, about musicians and magicians and daring escapes and friendship. So many stories, over the years, and he always thought that she got them out of books, or made them up to entertain him. And entertain him they did. Oh, how he loved those stories. He wrote them down, many of them, drew pictures to go along with the words, and when he was older and able to compose, sometimes he would compose to the memories of those stories in his mind, weaving the music to fit.

He never dreamed that they were real, had been real, once.

The realisation of the truth struck him, late one night as he read through the old letters (for what must surely be the hundredth time) that the Persian man – Monsieur Khan – sent to his mother. Traces of the words felt familiar, and it was only as he studied them on the page that he realised why. His mother, his poor, dear, late mother, told him these very stories when he was a little boy.

Charles cannot help the ache in his heart at the thought. His mother wanted him to know about Erik, she wanted him to know, and she told him about him in the only way she knew how, and tears burn his eyes, but he does not blink them away. Oh, if he could go back. If he could go back, and talk to her, and ask her about him—He can see the tears that would spring to her eyes, can picture them and the way she would twist her handkerchief into knots, and he would hug her, and fight his own tears then so as not to hurt her more, but he cannot fight them now.

He hides the letters away after that, for weeks. Tries not to think about them or his mother or father, both fathers, both loved and longed for in different ways, and tries to focus instead on his music, on being _le Fantôme,_ but his thoughts drift back, ever drift back, to her and to them, and the pain in his heart demands that he pull those letters out, re-consult them, and learn the address of the Monsieur Khan that sent them.

It takes Charles days, several long days, before he can work up the nerve to go to the address, to discover if this Monsieur Khan even still lives there, but he does in the end, and he composes himself, dresses in his finest clothes – his own, not the ones pulled from his fath— _Erik's_ old wardrobe – and sets out.

He is not certain what he expected of Monsieur Khan, or of his manservant, Darius, but he is certain that being greeted with a soft smile and gentle eyes is not it. Monsieur Khan— _Nadir_ is an old man now, but his grip is still firm when he takes Charles' hand and squeezes it. "You are very much like your father," he murmurs, "or how, he might have been, though there is something of your mother in you too." Charles' heart twists at the very words as they echo in his brain, _very much like your father, your father, very much like._ Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Or does it only make it more difficult for Raou—his _other_ father. He swallows the lump in his throat, and nods, asking the very question that has plagued him for so long.

"What were they like?" And it is as easy as that to talk to him, to hear about Erik from the lips of his friend, and they talk a long time, Darius bringing them tea, the same lemon tea his mother always drank when she had that sad, distant look in her eyes, and it is sometime after nightfall when Charles looks up from his tea to see that it has grown very late indeed.

"They loved each other dearly," Nadir says, rising to shake Charles' hand once more as he prepares to take his leave, "more, perhaps, than was truly wise, on either side. But I think it was a comfort to him, that she was there at the end, and I think—I think he would have been proud, to have a son like you." The words pierce Charles' heart, make tears prickle his eyes, and he nods, barely able to speak and Nadir smiles softly at him again, and murmurs, "Go well." After, Charles is not certain whether he imagined the tears that shone in his jade eyes too.

But that night, tucked up beneath the Garnier in the lake house that once was his father's, he is able to sleep peacefully for the first time in a long time, his dreams free of the ghosts that have haunted them. And when he wakes he knows, with bone-deep certainty, that it is time to think about going home. Back to England, back to Raoul, back to the man who might not truly be his father, but has been his father in every way that matters.

And his thinks, privately, that Erik would be happy to know that.


End file.
